Daily Excelsior... Editorial

EDITORIAL

By Samuel Baid

Whenever Pakistani and Chinese leaders met in they 1960s and 1970s, one heard a Chinese chorus "China-Pak friendship is as deep as the ocean and as high as the Himalayas." One did not hear it much in the 1980s and 1990s – until Chinese President Hu Jintao began his four-day Pak visit on November 23, 2006 with this chorus. He also described China-Pak relations as "evergreen" and Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said they were "sweeter than honey". .. ...more

Nepal's revolutionary accommodation

By Pinaki Bhattacharya

Albert Camus had said, "Methods of thought which claims to gives the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion." Many could feel a sense of despair in these words. For a rebellion is supposed to run its violent and bloody course till emancipation dawns on its participants........more

Paradigm shift in
Indian feminism

By Mani Pande

EDITORIAL

Jai Mata Di

The architectural design of the proposed Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence in Katra printed in this newspaper recently has lifted one's spirits. It is one more example of tremendous public good that proper utilisation of religious offerings can do. The Institute will be a multi-speciality hospital and medical college. It will be completed in three phases. The first step is to have a cancer hospital in 15 months. The second envisages addition of four super specialities of neurology, cardiology, orthopaedics and trauma centre besides diagnostic equipment for minimum usage of all patients. The third seeks medical college, nursing college, research centre, holistic centre and meditation centre apart from other medical systems like Ayurveda, Unani, homeopathy and yoga. "Faith" has also been included in this list. It will be interesting to watch how it is translated into a reality. In figurative terms it any way prevails in the atmosphere in the lap of Vaishno Devi. Initial estimates are that the entire project will cost about Rs 250 crores in three years. When it assumes concrete shape it will match the prestigious Postgraduate Institute (PGI) based in Chandigarh. In fact, its background gives it an advantage that perhaps no other similar structure can claim in the country. Set against the magnificent Trikuta hills all its beds will provide a glimpse of the holy trek to the sacred cave. It will also have a lake to be called the Vaishno Sarovar. There will be herbal plantations. Landscaping will no doubt hone the rough surface into a patch of rare beauty. One can imagine the economic prosperity it will usher in and around its location in Painthal between Jammu and Udhampur.

As it is the once secluded village is humming with a lot of activity these days. At present it has the campus of the Vaishno Devi University as its showpiece. It is a matter of days before it has wider roads. The work is already in progress at the construction of a railway track --- Painthal will be a railway station between Udhampur and Katra. One hopes that a direct road link is also established between the hospital and the nearby national highway. It will come in handy to provide immediate relief to victims of accidents that take place now and then.

The hospital will meet a long-felt need of not only the area but the State. There can't be differing opinions about this. Some non-resident Indians who are devotees of the Goddess are said to have promised special help for raising the facility. This is in addition to what millions contribute in their own way. This will be another feather in the cap of the Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board. In fact, the Board has set a great example in this part of the country about managing a shrine for common welfare. Step by step it has effectively and efficiently transformed the surroundings. The climb to the cave has become very comfortable. There are numerous restaurants and well-equipped lodging arrangements. The Board has done all this and much more. It has achieved a highly commendable breakthrough with the successful functioning of the University which is showing definite signs of becoming a top educational centre. One can only gratefully salute Vaishno Devi for Her countless bounty. Jai Mata Di.

People like us?

The story of a Pakistani youth visiting more than eight cities in the country before being apprehended in Kanachak in this region sounds bizarre. According to a report in this newspaper he travelled without any visa. From take-off till he landed in jail he managed to hoodwink everybody. He threw dust into the eyes of his country's authorities and crossed Wagah in the train. He managed to change Pakistani currency with Indian rupees and had just Rs 1710 in his pocket on entering this country. His first halt was the much revered Sufi shrine in Ajmer. After spending a few days there he headed for Bangladesh, of all places. He caught hold of a tout to help cross over the Indo-Bangladesh border. He stayed with his uncle in Bangladesh and returned to Kolkata. It seems he was detained in the West Bengal Capital but was able to secure his release by feeding the police with wrong information. He went to the national capital and kept on shuttling from one place to the other. He did stint as a labourer in Baroda in Gujarat to earn some money after he had exhausted his funds. He made an attempt to return to Pakistan via Gujarat but did not succeed. Eventually he came to this city and found himself in police net. What should one read between the lines in his trip? One conclusion will, of course, be that there is corruption, inefficiency and lethargy spread all over the sub-continent. It is very easy to penetrate each country's borders despite their professed alertness and hostility. Clearly, the security surveillance within the country leaves much to be desired. This has been decisively proved earlier also with the mass infiltration of illegal migrants from Bangladesh and their migration from one corner to the other. Indeed, the young man has exposed several chinks in one go. It is highly incredulous that the Kolkata police should not have cared to check the details like address furnished by him. His interrogation which is said have been sustained has not revealed his involvement in any militancy or other undesirable activities. One will tend to believe that absolute precaution has been taken at least at this stage to verify his antecedents.

Looked from one angle it is a clear case of security lapse all the way. However, there is another side of the tale. It drives homes the reality that the people in sub-continent are the same everywhere. They speak the same language, wear the matching attire and have identical dietary habits. The experience of Bangladeshis is a case in point. They travel all over without possessing authorised documents. One hardly hears of their being detected in a crowd in a train --- their main mode of conveyance. Any person from this country can walk through Lahore or Islamabad in Pakistan. Unless he reveals his identity on his own he is unlikely to face an awkward question. This has been the understanding of those who have visited Pakistan on more than one occasion. Likewise a Pakistani visitor to India will find himself at ease. There is thus an argument for making the movement across the sub-continent free from all hindrances. All of us know that unfortunately it is easier said than achieved at this juncture.

Pak-China relations

By Samuel Baid

A pivotal factor in China-Pak relations continues to be India. In the 1950s when the "Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai" phase was at it peak, General Ayub Khan proposed to India a joint defence pact. India’s then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cold-shouldered the proposal by asking Ayub: "joint defence against whom?" Ayub had pushed Pakistan into United States-led defence pacts which were basically aimed at the Communist world. It is, therefore, generally agreed that Ayub’s proposal targeted China. Ayub was suspicious of China.

But China began emerging Pakistan’s best friend as the India-China love affair started waning towards the late 1950s because of their differences over China’s territorial claims. These differences climaxed into the Chinese aggression against India in 1962. Mr.Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was then in Ayub’s cabinet, advised him to take advantage of the Chinese aggression against India by grabbing Kashmir. Bhutto, who had himself revealed this after he took control of Pakistan in December 1971, said Ayub was afraid of the US displeasure. However, Bhutto prevailed upon Ayub to forge close relations with China now that it had become an enemy of India. After the 1962 war Pakistan and China signed their first trade agreement. Bhutto also persuaded Ayub to sign an illegal agreement with China in respect of occupied Kashmir. The two countries signed the agreement in March 1963 under which Pakistan gave away 2,700 sq miles of Hunza in Gilgit-Baltistan to China illegally and in violation of the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions on Kashmir by which it (Pakistan) swears. The Ameer of Hunza, who protested, was to be punished later when Bhutto became the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Since then China has fully exploited Pakistan’s hostility towards India without helping it much. One may remember Bhutto’s assurance to Ayub before the 1965 war that the Chinese had told him that they would defend East Pakistan. Consequently, East Pakistan was left undefended by the Pakistani Army. But China’s help to Pakistan in the 1965 war was confined to some hollow threats to India. In the 1971 India-Pak war the Chinese did not do even that much despite all the talk of friendship – deep as the ocean and high as the Himalayas. The people of Pakistan were shocked by China’s indifference to the greatest crisis of their history. When East Pakistan separated and became Bangladesh, the mourning people in Punjab accused China of letting them down.

But China had already obliged Pakistan by keeping quiet about the massacre and rape of Bengalis by the Pakistani Army while the whole world had revolted against it in the run up to East Bengal’s liberation. Or, may be, the Chinese were privy to Ayub’s grand scheme of ridding Pakistan of Bengalis (After the 1965 war Ayub Khan had revealed this scheme to some politicians including leader of National Awami Party (NAP) Wali Khan).

Beginning with the 1970s China began to change its policy towards the sub-continent. Its bombastic support for the right of self-determination for Kashmiris died down. It slowly but steadily worked for economic cooperation with India separating from it its claims on Indian territories. Chinese leaders including then Prime Minister Li Peng advised Pakistan not to let Kashmir be a stumbling block in economic relations with India. Pakistanis did not accept this suggestion saying Kashmir was not just a territorial issue like the one which existed between India and China.

But Chinese have always taken care not to give an impression to Pakistan that all was well in India-China relations. That explains why the Chinese Ambassador in India made their claims to Arunachal Pradesh just on the eve of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to India. A reassurance to Pakistan can also be seen in Mr.Hu Jintao’s statement calling for early solution of India-China border problems. This statement was made just before emplaning for Islamabad on November 23. It was apparently meant to tell Pakistan that China’s growing economic relations with India has not diluted its disputes with it (India).

Between March 1963 and now, Pakistan’s importance has increased tremendously for China. Pakistan can be used to be a constant irritant against India to check its economic growth and influence in the region and beyond. Also, Chinese can dump their obsolete weapon technology on Pakistan and have access to weapons given to it (Pakistan) by the United States for various reasons. During President Hu Jintao’s visit it looked as if the present Pak rulers were willing to let whole of the country serve China’s global interests. China wants to start an electronic factory in Pakistan for which ruling Quaid Muslim League Chief Choudhry Shujjat Hussain said land for this project would be provided free. It was presumed in Pakistan that the land would be given either in Gwadar or Karachi.

In Gwadar, China is helping in the construction of a deep-sea port. Now the plan is to link Gwadar with the Xinjiang province of China. That will give China access to the ports in the Gulf region which attract goods from all over the world.

The Government-to-Government relations between China and Pakistan have been good but the people-to-people contacts have been as good as non-existent. In fact an increased visibility of Chinese in Pakistan can make the people hostile to them. There is hatred for Chinese in Balochistan. A few months ago the farming community in Punjab was alarmed when China dumped its vegetables in Pakistani markets. In the 1970s, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan complained to Bhutto that the Chinese, engaged in building the Karakoram Highway, were actually spying against Pakistan.

(The writer is Director, Institute for Media Studies & Information)

Nepal's revolutionary accommodation

By Pinaki Bhattacharya

When the Nepalese revolutionaries were compared with the Shining Path of Peru, many had thought they would be as unrelenting and as intractable as the South American group. But in the last year the former has shown that violence too have a mind of its own thus underlining a keen strategic sense. Nepalese revolutionaries have shown that politics of consensus has to pick up the pieces where the guns have left them.

This week, Nepalese Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) agreed to disarm in consonance with an agreement with the Kathmandu Government. The guerilla soldiers acquiesced to remain sequestered in seven cantonments as the nation readied to elect a Constituent Assembly. These cadres would not be able to campaign in the polls but will vote.

Earlier, last week the Government and the Communist party of Nepal (Maoist) had signed a pathbreaking peace deal that ended the military operations of both sides. They had been earlier suspended under a ceasefire concluded soon after the monarch, King Gyanendra had stepped aside to reinstate Parliamentary governance. The peace deal provided for a 'truth and reconciliation commission' to be formed to bridge the gulf between the rulers and the ruled - by focusing on the excesses of the decade - long struggle for political transformation. Would South Asia thus witness the making of history with the first successful political revolution of 21st century occuring on its own territory?

And would the dominoes fall? For curious changes are taking place around the world. In the American continent, a large blob of red has emerged south of a sea of blue. Almost every country in Latin America is turning left. If last week was the turn of Nicaragua, this week it was Ecuador. And all this is happening away from the harsh glare of attention that now is busy dealing with the ill-advised, so called 'War on Terror' (WOT).

Gone are the days when a Daniel Ortega in political power would kick off a long war of insurgency between the US-backed Contra rebels and the Government in Managua. Today, when Ortega returns to the same political power, Washington merely says that it would acknowledge his victory in the polls after it has ascertained its genuineness.

So has the world bourgeoisie accepted as an irreversible reality the leftward tilt of a vast swathe of people around the world? Has the end of Cold War deadened their missionary zeal to keep the globe under the fold of world capitalism? Or are they merely distracted by the rise of a medieval contest between Christianity and Islam?

A search for answers to these myriad questions led to an article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine. Written by a former Mexican foreign minister and a current academic in the USA, Jorge G Castaneda, it argues, "Under no circumstances should anyone accept the division of the hemisphere into two camps - for the United States, against the United States - because under such a split, the Americas themselves always lose out. Such a division happened over Cuba in the 1960s and over Central America in the 1980s. Now that the Cold War is over, it should never happen again. So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter."

So what is this difference between the good and the evil Left. The good Left is supposedly those who seek to live within the confines of the post-Cold War global economic system and seeks to deliver better governance under its tutelage. And the latter are those who challenge it. Thus a Hugo Chavez needs to be run down while a Lula da Silva is to be extolled. For the latter's, "Old-School Anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile, realism, and resignation," while the former has to be reviled as a 'populist' dinosaur.

Communist revolutionaries of Nepal have a job, in their turn, to prove whether their travails were to lead a transformative experience or mere reformation of a rickety system.

Some Western scholars believe the rise of Leftism in the developing world is a result of an interrupted nation-building process. They believe that, poverty with democratic rights of universal franchise is a potent combination for the Left to emerge victorious.

Pushpa Kamal Dahal and his men have in their turn talked of an immediate vision of a Nepalese state as a democratic republic. And the economic philosophy of this new nation they would like to fashion will be of national capitalism. Obviously, they would have to immerse themselves in the process of development of an economy characterised hitherto by feudalist production relations. Western imperium would be waiting for that opportunity thrown up by the basic vulnerability. (CNF)

Paradigm shift in Indian feminism

By Mani Pande

Common wisdom in India usually associates feminism with the revolt of spunky young women of our times. But there must be thousands of young women scattered around this country, who have a unique grandmother, more liberal than her daughter. Listening to generations of young women, from both upper and lower-middle crusts of our society over the years, I've noticed that when young women tend to speak about much loved and unique grandmothers, they describe them as friends: someone who has rescued them from the lethal edge of passivity or self-destructive anger, someone who has given them self-respect, a sense of humour and redemption from terminal self-doubt. Obviously, it is time we looked at the era that shaped our grandmothers with respect and in a genuine spirit of modesty.

The unique thought-cycle created by the progression of women's thoughts moving first from political to personal, and thence to political, is actually what led to the birth of our first all-India women's organisations; Women's India Association (WIA) was born in 1917. Beginning from 1922, many such institutions also came up in Hyderabad and Madras.

Durgabai Deshmukh, the first women member in the Planning Commission, had associated closely with these institutions. As a member of the sub-committee of the National Planning Committee by 1931, she dealt with the question of democratic institutions and examined the role of women in a planned economy. When in 1950 she became a member of the Planning Commission she made sure that women's issues were not relegated to marginal voluntary bodies. "The march," she said, "is towards social justice and equality, as much as economic justice and equality. Welfare work is not some temporary relief measure but consists of long-term rehabilitation." It was such a mindset that laid out the basic agenda for Indian feminism. It is still valid in our time, but we are increasingly reluctant to acknowledge the fact in the age of globalised markets and privatisation. The year 1919 marked a huge growth of mass movements in India; headed by Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. Women under his leadership became an inalienable part of the political mainstream. However, elderly women activists like Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, a medical doctor and a founder member of WIA; realised early on, that political activism per se was a little too 'flashy' and that, in the long run, women have their fora for voicing their grievances and discussing their long-term solutions.

In 1945, the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) sought to ensure women's rights in the ticklish area of personal law and tried to have guarantees protecting women's rights incorporated into the Constitution, when the Constituent Assembly for drafting India's constitution was being set up. Hansa Mehta, Amrit Kaur and Laxmi Menon called for equality of sexes as a basis of citizenship in India and demanded that the status of women vis-…-vis education, health, work, property rights and the family be clearly delineated, regardless of caste or religious community.

The masculine style revolutions have variously, and over the centuries begun easily on as generational clashes among men and the young men have then gone on to challenge the authoritarian, feudalism, capitalism or the caste-class systems set up by older generation of men. But even when they fought each other, men have always been in agreement with each other about preserving the anthropological order of male dominance. Women like Reddy, Mehta, Kaur and Sucheta Kripalani realised this. They also understood how the sexual caste system and the unequal personal laws created the biggest crucible for fostering male dominance and controlling the lives of Indian women and social institutions. The young women on our campuses today, whose ideas about politics are mostly limited to who is running for the Presidentship of the college union, or going out and demonstrating against atrocities against tigers, dalits, minorities or the ecosystem, seem too na‹ve and timid in comparison. They are mostly providing a sense of virtue to their peer groups without really challenging a patriarchal power structure that is still running women's daily lives through discriminatory socio-economic policies.

Today in 2006, the triumph of the free market and the political trivialisation of swadeshi have helped market forces co-opt the language of feminism in a big way. The market yokes the idea of the new woman to consumer with attitude. Thus the Women's Day programmes are sponsored by manufacturers of domestic appliances and beauty products for women; and the beautiful women go on to present themselves as the new icons who consume and are, therefore, free, we are, they say in advertisement after advertisement, less aggressive and louder than our mothers. We are quiet and self-assured and know what we wish to consume. Unlike the older feminists we do not need to yell or look plain and understated. We have arrived. Well have they?

The latest statistics of women's increasing unemployment, their decreasing numbers in the organised sector and Parliament, and the alarming rise in crimes against women all across the country are all undeniable pointers that we have not come a long way.

Instead, a subtle backlash against feminism has gathered force, and it has cut off the few from the many. The few who have advanced, seek to perpetuate, as a professional survival tactic, the male perfected status quo in their professional field. If the men say there must be a caste-based quota within the quota for women that is fine with them. If men decree that the free market must be allowed to grow and dictate terms and throw unskilled women out of jobs; they accept that too, so long as their own pay packages are protected.

So we see that while the Right-wing political groups condemn women's independence and prescribe dress codes for schoolgirls; spew venom against 'bold' films made by women directors, there is a sharp rise in rape and pornography depicting extreme violence against women.

Successful women choose to sidestep these ugly issues and network with male peers who have long considered political activism a dirty down-market area. The original meaning of the world 'feminist' (that appeared first in a book review in 1895) was a woman who "has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence". And it still remains a basic proposition for Indian women. INAV